John Connelly on Catholic Racism and Nostra Aetate
Some of you will have read John Connelly’s superb piece (password necessary) on theologian Karl Adam in the Jan. 18 issue. Connelly emphasizes that Adam at once believed in an anti-Semitic racialism, and even spoke favorably of Hitler as a promoter of “blood unity,” while at the same time emerging as one of the leading “progressive” theologians in the period before Vatican II. (Interestingly, and by contrast, our own Joseph Komonchak has written on how the “progressive” French theologians of the 1950s and 1960s tilted toward opposition to Vichy and early awareness of the poisonous effects of anti-Semitism.) For a taste of Connelly’s ongoing work on the origins of Nostra Aetate, admidst the maelstrom of Vienna in the 1930s, look at his “Catholic Racism and Its Opponents” in the current Journal of Modern History. It’s a terrific article, with interesting analogies to the Catholic experience of racism and racialist thought in the United States. One of the concluding paragraphs: “What lessons can one draw from this story of Catholic racism? The first pertains to the Church itself. Despite its social and institutional coherence, there was no such thing as ‘the Church’: bishops, clergy, and politically engaged Catholics spoke with many voices. Scholars who focus on Vatican pronouncements of universalism would conclude that if any question was settled in the 1930s, it was the race question. In fact, the institutional Church left huge spaces for debate about how to discern divine will in history, whether through nation, race or other categories. And Catholics speculated with passion, especially in Central Europe.”
John Connelly does an excellent job explaining how many German Catholic theologians and intellectuals could be attracted to Hitler and Nazism, but I couldn’t help wondering why, and admiring that, so many Protestant theologians–especially the founders of the Confessing Church (Bonhoeffer, Barth, Niemoller, for example) were able to see early on that Nazism was evil incarnate and would be intolerant of Christianity. Why weren’t these Protestant theologians swept up in the admiration for Hitler that seems to have afflicted so many Catholic prelates and theologians? And if so many German Catholic bishops failed to witness for Christ, then thank goodness for the example set by Fr. Alfred Delp and other Catholic priests and lay people.
I don’t know enough about Karl Adam to know if he ever recanted his anti-Semitism. One would hope that he had done so before he received the honor of participating in the preparations for Vatican II.
In the early 90s Dr. [Rabbi] Ellis Rivken gave a lecture at the U, San Francisco that exlained to me how the failure of European Catholicism came about.
he asked us to drawin our heads a 400 mile circle with Viena as the center,’ “That’s the old Holy Roman Empire. That’s the core of WWII European Catholicism. That’s the birthplace of the Holocaust; almost all the insigators ,raised Catholic, came from there. They were nurtued, and breast fed on anti-Semitism”
You can look it up .I did.
The hierarchs were for the most part had been raised in aristocratic circles and they believed ‘Europe belongs to us , not Jew bankers’
Peasant-raised John XXIII was not one of them, so when he witnessed the failure of European Catholicism from his post as nuncio in Turkey, he set up an escape route for Jews thru Turkey. When Pope, Vatican II became his personal answer to the failure of European Catholicism.
If I’m not mistaken, the theologians who participated in the “Confessing Church” were a minority among German-speaking Protestant theologians, too. I believe there was a book about this five or ten years ago, and I’ve been waiting for a similar work on Catholic theologians during the period. A general failure. What was it? German nationalism? Identification of Volk and Kirche?
Some years ago, I was at a meeting in Germany where a project on the history of theology in Germany was being discussed. It covered all the twentieth century except the period when Hitler was in power. It was an astonishing omission, but those who had planned the project–not themselves old enough to have been active during those years–seemed oblivious to the omission, didn’t think it odd.
A clarification: I don’t think Adam had any role in the preparations for Vatican II, if by this is meant the work of the official commissions that had the task of preparing texts for the Council to consider. I have never come across his name in connection with the Council. He would have been 85 when the Council opened.
“Scholars who focus on Vatican pronouncements of universalism would conclude that if any question was settled in the 1930s, it was the race question.”
Interesting point. In the “Sisters in Selma” program about nuns in the U.S. civil rights movement, it was noted that the bishop who headed the diocese that covered Birmingham, Ala., tolerated Jim Crow and told the nuns they could not march. They got around that by setting up coffee stations and staffing a clinic where injured protesters could be cared for.
In Episcopal Churches down South, which used a common cup, black parishioners were required to sit in the back of the church, and were not allowed to receive before a while parishioner. Not to dredge up old wounds, but I wonder if some Catholic churches didn’t do the same.
This kind of article is quite important. As did the fiasco of Nazi Germany it reminds us again of the importance of conscience when confronted by evil commands or leadership. Also it shows the danger of a triumphant view of Christian history. Most importantly it shows the evil of nationalism. In the US Cardinal Spellman was the greatest transgressor in this regard. This also brings out the danger of emotion in corrupting our morals. Germany was so upset at the results of the First World War and the poor conditions in its country that any leader was preferred as long as he gave them something to cheer about. This kind of thinking,”Europe belongs to us”, one could conclude, was behind Ratzinger’s objection to Turkey joining the European union.
Finally, anti-semitism was clearly accepted in Europe also at the time not only among the clergy but among many writers, poets and intellectuals. Clive James, in his important book “Cultural Amnesia” (2007) points out how so many so-called secular liberals in Europe created the climate for the holocaust.
Most of all the review of these times beckons a serious humility in accepting that we are a church constanly reforming itself and how easy it is stray into killing our neighbor and justifying it. The holocaust happened and was executed by and under Christians. Donnely notes how unimportant arguments about liturgical advance look when we abandon the most fundamental tenets of the gospel.
I was intrigued to read about Joseph Ratzinger’s take on this topic, given that he grew up in the heart of this circle that Rabbi Rivken sketched. On the one hand, this was the anti-semitic heartland, but Austria and Bavaria (really one region, historically) were also fiercely independent and disliked much of Nazi centralization, which they (and Ratzinger) associated with Prussian (and Protestant) northern overlords. So there was a tension. But there was also a deep anti-semitism. Ratzinger believes that so many Protestant theologians went soft on the Nazis because they had such a “thin” ecclesiology (and theology), and thus nothing to protect them from falling head over heels with the religion of Nazi nationalism. He sees the Catholic church as a bastion of anti-Nazism but thinks the Catholic Church’s main failing was trying (vainly) to protect its institutional assets by making peace, and making nice, with Hitler. I think he is simplistic, and far too defensive of the Catholic Church’s historic role. But such a view is understandable given his birthright. Historically speaking, it is hard to make generalizations. The Catholic Church had Delp (profiled in a recent America magazine) and many others, and the Confessing Church had Bonhoeffer et al. But can one make a statistical comparison? I think nationalism trumped all for the majority of Christians. But the Kirche of the Volk was Protestantism. With notable exceptions, the Catholic hierarchy stood up to Hitler too often out of self-interest, rather than the Gospel. In that Ratzinger is right. But he certainly doesn’t want to go much deeper than that, and his praise of Adam’s theology in “Jesus of Nazareth” is charactertistic. I just read the Adam piece last night and thought it excellent and an important addition to the record. I’ll look for the Journal of Modern History article.
PS: Bill makes a good point about cultural liberals in love with the Nazis, and Connelly seems to begin to get at that. Perhaps he does moreso in the Journal. It’s a good and provocative point that would tie in with views of those mushy German Protestants. But I think the “conservative” Catholic leadership that resisted did so out of more mundane, turf-defending reasons than some of the moral heroism that is now cited.
Perhaps because I live in El Salvador, I thought of someone immediately when I read Bill Mazzella’s comment: “[Connelly’s article] reminds us again of the importance of conscience when confronted by evil commands or leadership.” That was precisely the point made by Archbishop Oscar Romero in his famous homily on the day before he was killed:
Who was this man capable of saying those words? Tom Quigley, who worked for decades at the USCCB’s Office of International Justice and Peace, knew Archbishop Romero, saw him up close in the days before his death, and was present when he gave the homily. Quigley later wrote,
The response – a single bullet, fired by a sharpshooter – came early the following evening, as Monseñor Romero was celebrating Mass.
I believe that voter support for Hitler in his early days was overwhelming in the Protestant north, in marked difference to the Catholic South. So Ratzinger may have a point on this score.
One of those ironies that Hitler, baptized a Catholic (though not raised so particularly) a few miles away from ratzinger’s birthplace, would join forces with the Prussian north of Bismarck’s kulturkampf, which led directly to Hitler’s kirchenkampf. That the Catholic South later jumped on the Hitler bandwagon is a messy story, and part of that story is the tale of the Vatican’s suppression of the Catholic Center Party in Germany. Would things have turned out differently? I doubt it. Hitler would have crushed a civil rebellion in the South. But that’s alt history.
A quick note on Vienna and regionalism more broadly: Connelly’s argument in the Journal of Modern History is actually more subtle than suggested above. As I understand it he at once acknowledges (as does everyone studying the period) that the city was saturated in anti-Semitic thought. It was, after all, the place where Hitler received his ideological formation . At the same time, Catholics in Vienna, often converts from Judaism, helped develop a serious body of anti-racist thought as they battled a vicious (and often Catholic inspired) anti-Semitism. These anti-racist Catholics were not especially numerous or even influential in the 1930s. But their work did have influence and importance in the context of the 1960s.
I would emphasize David G.’s point that, historically, Catholics were more likely to view themselves as outsiders, and to resist appeals to nationalism. A few of my relatives left Bavaria and other Catholic parts of Germany because they objected to universal peacetime conscription imposed by Bismarck. However, by the 1930s, it’s safe to say that the German nation was far more unified on national than religious lines (just as the American nation was far more unified on national than ethnic lines), both largely the result of WWI (which definitively caused most German-Americans to stop seeing themselves as such). One wonders whether the reaction of churches and pastors to the rise of Hitler and Nazism was as much a factor of the people within their congregation, as the opposite.
I wonder if the main problem isn’t nationalism, not racism–and I don’t think that all anti-Semitism has been racialist. During the First World War, when Benedict XV remained neutral, the Germans called him the French Pope and the French called him “le pape boche.” (The Italians called him Maledetto XV.) He had to write to the French Church to warn them against turning the Sacred Heart devotion and symbol into an instrument of French patriotism: the Sacred Heart belongs to all Catholics, he said. (There have been, ever since the 17th century, efforts made to have the symbol of the Sacred Heart placed on the French flag; if done, it was said, the French armies would never lose another battle. It wasn’t done, and look at the recent record of the French armies!)
Think also of how so many French Catholics were attracted to Action francaise which was fiercely nationalistic, anti-German and anti-Semitic. (Its leader, Charles Maurras, praised the Catholic Church for having diluted the poison of the Magnificat–”he has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly”–by putting it to beautiful music.
Consider the following plea by a theologian that we try to overcome the limitations of a privatized theology:
>> To every age the eternal gospel must be proclaimed. But to every age it has to be proclaimed differently, as an answer to the specific questions of that age… At the time of the Reformation the question of salvation was the question of deliverance from guilt, of peace with God… Today we are an utterly political species. And our quest for “salvation” comes alive in the political dimension. People of our day are not concerned about peace with God, but with overcoming political calamity in the broadest sense–the mortal distress of a people, the destruction of the national community, the freedom of the people for its own life, the fulfillment of its particular mission. If that is the key question for our age, the gospel must be preached to it in terms of its “political” concept: the kingdom of God, the Lordship of God.<<
With a few changes, this could have been a paragraph proposing a “political theology” or a “theology of liberation”. In fact, however, it was written by the German theologian Paul Althaus; the original language for “people” was “Volk,” and the Kingdom of God was here invoked as part of an apologia in the service of the Third Reich. (Paul Althaus, in an article written in 1933 and entitled “The Third Reich and the Kingdom of God,” quoted in Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, I, 104, as cited by M. Hollerich, Pro Ecclesia 2 (1993) 316n)
We can argue about how good men easily fall into the trap of racist thinking, even to the point of genocide.
Thanks to Gene Palumbo for his post on more recent events.
But what about us here today? and our Church?
I was quite moved to read James Phelps, O.P major address at the CTA conferebce, “Church as Communion Beyond Racism: Embodying the Visio nOf Jesus.” ( Iwould think pront copies would be available from CTA.)
We’ve just been reminded by a major presidential candidate (changing positions) that we can’t solve the immigration questio, we can only work to secure our borders.
Just as our ideology seems to drive our values (and not vice cersa), we need to ask ouirselves
about how deeply ideology has affected the political policies of the next presidency; also, how much comitmen thas our Churc hleadership shown to the minorities it keep saying it values?
“Those who have not learned the lessons of history…”
“Think also of how so many French Catholics were attracted to Action francaise which was fiercely nationalistic, anti-German and anti-Semitic. (Its leader, Charles Maurras, praised the Catholic Church for having diluted the poison of the Magnificat–”he has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly”–by putting it to beautiful music.”
Thank you for this Joe K. What a powerful statement. Amazing how art can be used wrongly. As Jesus warned, how many would be put to death in the name of God and Jesus.
Isn’t something similar going on today with many American Christians vigorously supporting the Iraqi war? http://mars-or-bust.blogspot.com/2003_03_30_mars-or-bust_archive.html#91899449